It's Back!

That's right, the annual St. Mary Orthodox Church Middle East Food Faire is back! For the past two years, in October, St. Mary Orthodox Church has treated local Omaha residents and out-of-towners to delicacies from the Middle East to wow your taste buds and leave you coming back for more.

If you're in the Omaha area on Sunday, October 19 from 12:00--6:00 pm, please come out to St. Mary and enjoy some good Middle Eastern cooking. There will be kibbe, zata, fataya, grape leaves, cabbage rolls and always good tasting baklava, the way only the Arabs make it. Are you a vegetarian? No problem! There will be couscous, tabouli and fataya, grape leaves and cabbage rolls are just as good without the meat in them!

We look forward to seeing you. Contact and ticket information is on the flier. Thank you.

Why did Rome fall?

Perhaps the greatest question to come out of antiquity: Why did Rome fall? How could the greatest civilization of all time (in my opinion, of course) simply just collapse? To find the answer, visit my blog Roma Victrix (Rome, the Conqueror) to find out. Many have tried to answer the question, many have given up and many more were simply wrong.

However, when reading Dr. Demandt's explanation, note how everything has its diametric opposite? So apparently lack of education and too much education can have the same result. Enjoy.

An old moral tale with a new twist

OLD VERSION: The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed.The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!

MODERN VERSION: The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long,building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.

CBS, NBC , PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast and they want our country to be more fair.

How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so? Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy Being Green.'

Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant 's house where the news stations film the group singing,'We shall overcome.' Jesse then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake.

Nancy Pelosi & John Kerry exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his
home is confiscated by the government.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government housing he is in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because he didn't maintain it.

The ant has disappeared in the snow. The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be VERY careful how you vote in 2010

School bus violence racially motivated

Already a number of people are aware of this video that surfaced which shows a white student being beaten by several black students while others stood around and cheered on a schoolbus.

After I posted yesterday, my first immediate thought about this attack was whether this would be viewed as a hate crime. In fact Belleville Police Captain Don Sax said in an initial interview that there was a racial motivation for the attack. Now he is retracting his statement saying that he jumped to conclusions spurred on by the emotions which the video incited. You can read the initial story and follow-up here.

I'm glad that the police officer admitted he rushed to judgment, which is bad for any investigation. But had the siutation been the opposite, if white students had beaten up a black student, the NAACP would have already booked hotel rooms in Belleville for the next few weeks to decry this, go to the schoolboard and demand a racial tolerance curriculum for a day, etc..

As I wrote yesterday, the election of Barack Obama, historic as it was, was not going to quell the racism that does still exist in this country, but in many ways will exascerbate the issue. But still, the vast majority of people in this country are tolerant people. Yet, we are seeing race in everything that transpires on a daily basis in this country or at least we are if the victims are black.

I also wrote yesterday about a Newsweek article which reproduces a study which concludes that white babies are racist. However, there was no study done about babies who are black, Latino or Oriental and whether they grow up to be racist. If we want to have a racism discussion in this country, as Attorney General Holder thinks we are too cowardly to do, then it must engage in all aspects of racism, regardless of which racial group it is directed towards. But Attorney General Holder doesn't want an honest discussion. His dropping of the charges against a group of New Black Panthers in Philadelphia where they were clearly intimidating voters.
I don't think Holder wants a discussion on race relations, he wants to lecture.

And it's only going to continue...

Must we find racism in everything?

Kanye West is infamous for shooting his mouth off. I don't care much for his "music" and that's a generous appraisal. Over the years, Mr. West has compared himself to Jesus (I keep overlooking that part in the Gospels where Jesus is driving in his pimped out ride with his posse of the 12 looking for hos!) and has even declared that, in the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, President Bush must hate black people since many blacks perished. (Note to Kanye: Look at the stats. More white people died in Katrina than blacks!) And yesterday at the VMAs, Kanye West wrestled the microphone away from Taylor Swift who won the award for Best Female Song to say that singer Beyonce, who is black (well, half-black anyway), was more deserving of it. Taylor was stunned and after the microphone was returned to her, she could barely say anything. To her credit, even Beyonce was stunned! Now I can read between the lines of Kanye's little rant: Beyonce's race was the factor that denied her the award.

Is everything racist now? For months now, legitimate opposition to Obama's policies has been decried as racist. Apparently, even not liking the Chicago White Sox can be construed as a racist attack because Obama is a fan of them. But it doesn't stop there. Charlie Rangel, the representative under numerous ethical probes by the House Ethics committee is crying that it is an underlying racism that is causing this investigation. The governor of New York, Patterson, who is performing abysmally at his job with near record low approval ratings is also starting to play the race card. Now a Newsweek article, which is part of a series that the news magazine is running as a dialogue on race, suggests that children are born racist from a study conducted. The testing sample was limited to white families only. I assume that one of the "variables held constant" in this study was the assumption that racism is endemic only to white families! And Maureen Dowd, the persistently irrelevant New York Times Op-ed columnist, declared that Joe Wilson's (inappropriate) outburst of "You lie" should have been heard as "You lie, boy!" This weekend, Serena Williams was called for a foot fault and immediately started to threaten the judge, cursing at her which resulted in Serena forfeiting her match point. And though the call was a terrible one (and it was!), there were numerous insinuations that racism was behind the call.

And the examples are too myriad to list.

We were told that when Obama ascended to the highest political office in the land, that racism would be on its deathbed. Such is not the case. In fact, it has been exascerbated! Too much is being thought in terms of race when that was never the case prior. Mr. Holder, Obama's Attorney General, called the United States a nation of cowards because we don't engage in racial discussions. Perhaps we don't, because the great vast majority of Americans are NOT racist nor harbor racist tendencies.
We're too busy treating our neighbor like ourselves. Are there racists in this country? Only a naive person would say no! But to see racism in every facet of ordinary life by polticians, news pundits, entertainers, etc. is ridiculous. They will never admit it, but it is they who are exascerbating the race issue, not ordinary Americans.

On a positive note, despite the ridiculous platitudes contained in the "I Pledge" video that ran on Youtube, there was a good part of this video. Michael Strahan, former defensive end for the New York Giants said (parphrasing) that he pledged to see himself as an American and not an African American! If only more would heed that.

I remember where I was...

when 9/11 occurred. I was living in Columbia, MO where I was attending Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia. It was a Tuesday morning and I had only one class later that day, my Latin epigraphy class. I woke up around 8:00 am. My clock/alarm was always funky. I could never quite get it tuned to an exact station so when I woke up that morning, I woke up to just a bunch of static noise. Occasionally, I could hear something intelligible. It was set to the local news/talk station so sometimes I did hear a report or something, but nothing really that I could understand. I walked into my living area of my Columbia apartment and turned on the TV. I just had to have some noise on that wasn't just random noise. The first image I saw was one of the the twin towers, in flames. At this point, just watching what was going on and trying to make sense of news flashing on the ticker as well as the reporter trying to give all this information at once, I saw a plane, like a black shadow hit the second tower. Before this, there was still the belief that this was just a serious accident of a plane horribly off course. But when I saw the second plane hit the second building, I knew that this was an attack.

I've always taught my students that geography is destiny. To prove this, I have taught them that the reason the United States has become such a power in the world is due to its geographic isolation because of the two ponds separating us from Europe and Asia. The United States has been attacked on its soil only three times in its history: 1) War of 1812 2) Pearl Harbor and 3) 9/11. Speaking academically, that's something incredible. But dispassionate academics must sometime give way to human suffering.

I tried to go through the rest of my day as if everything was OK. On the shuttle over to campus, the driver had the radio set to the talk station where all these reports were being speedily read over the air. Politicians were interviewed. I remember even hearing a statement from the Taliban that they insisted they were not responsible for what had happened which basically told me that they were lying.

I went to my epigraphy class and all of us sitting in the seminar room were just sitting. We didn't say anything, we didn't do anything. We just sat there. Dr. Trout walked into the room and he could clearly see that we were bothered by the events of the day and I know he was, too. He said we could go through the day's assignments as if nothing had changed, though clearly things had or we could discuss it. We opted to discuss things at first. I found out that no one had immediate family that had been killed in the event, but, at the same time, many reports were still very preliminary and needed follow-up. But we then went on to read some inscriptions--I don't even remember what they were of.

The next day I was to teach my myth class at 8:00 in the morning. I had everything laid out that I was going to talk about. That day's subject was Artemis (I remember that clearly for some reason). As I went in, I could see the look of despair, shock, anger in their faces. I told them that we could go through with the lesson as I had planned it, as if nothing had changed, though things have, or we could talk about it. They opted to talk about it. Reactions and statements ranged from fearful to anger. I had even one student say to me that if he had been on a plane he would have single-handedly taken out the terrorists. I decided not to address his bravado, though clearly a few students rolled their eyes at his suggestion.

The events on that Tuesday became all any of us could talk about for that week. Media wasn't talking about anything else Editorials screamed suggestions. But one thing was clear--Terrorism had come to America and we were now living in a post 9/11 world. It was the day everything changed.

To the victims of this horror, all of them, +Memory eternal.

Interesting discovery

A skull that rewrites the history of man

The conventional view of human evolution and how early man colonised the world has been thrown into doubt by a series of stunning palaeontological discoveries suggesting that Africa was not the sole cradle of humankind. Scientists have found a handful of ancient human skulls at an archaeological site two hours from the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, that suggest a Eurasian chapter in the long evolutionary story of man.


The skulls, jawbones and fragments of limb bones suggest that our ancient human ancestors migrated out of Africa far earlier than previously thought and spent a long evolutionary interlude in Eurasia – before moving back into Africa to complete the story of man.

Experts believe fossilised bones unearthed at the medieval village of Dmanisi in the foothills of the Caucuses, and dated to about 1.8 million years ago, are the oldest indisputable remains of humans discovered outside of Africa.

I find this particularly fascinating. Considering Georgia's close proximity to the Tigris and Euphrates, the two rivers that make up Mesopotamia and the fertile crescent, and which are also mentioned in Genesis as the rivers which border the Garden of Eden, could this perhaps maybe lend some creedence that the Genesis account does have some factual information in it and that Eden perhaps is not a myth and that man, at least a certain population of man, inhabited the area? It's not necessary to reconcile Genesis and scientific inquiry because the two, I believe, are not in conflict as many people will say. I'm curious to see if more discoveries are to come.